This article focuses on the criticism of Chilean everyday life in the writings of Joaquín Edwards Bello. The first part concentrates on important aspects of urban chronicle as a genre associated to its journalistic origin, structure, readership, and the conditions of Chilean modernity at the beginning of the 20th century. Supported by a brief corpus of chronicles, the second part of the article attempts to define one essential feature present in Edwards's criticism: namely a criticism of both a specific and uninterrupted mode in which power has been imposed on the Chilean society effecting extreme forms of polarization and the ideological discourses that "naturalize" its presence.